Englishman in New York

About a 10 minute walk from my parents’ house in Leeds is the Shaftesbury Parade of shops on Street Lane. In September, my mum was trapped on the parade in the middle of a storm that has hitherto become known in our house as “the Shaftesbury Tornado.” CLICK HERE for my mum’s eyewitness account of the devastation that day. (My apologies for the file size. I’ve not got the right video tools here so this is the best I can do. Be patient, it’s worth it. At least I think so.)

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So, the worst is over but I’m not quite there yet. After a week spent chained to the house and three days chasing tickets and passport on the phone, email and Internet, I am finally almost in Denmark.

My passport should arrive in Leeds on Saturday between 6am and 8am. I have booked a flight from Manchester to Copenhagen for 4.10pm and a train from Copenhagen at 8.40pm which will get me into Aarhus, Jutland, just after midnight. From there it will be a short hour-and-a-half journey to Sofie and our annual Danish Christmas ritual.

I’ll breathe a very big sigh of relief once I’m in Aarhus but I won’t be happy until I get there. In the meantime my parents just took me for a lovely walk to get a breath of fresh air and to stretch my legs (pics to follow). My eyes have been twitching so much lately that I resemble a very convincing impression of Inspector Dreyfus.

UPDATE: (Dec. 23, early AM) Passport has arrived. I leave for the train station in a few hours.

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My friend Dave has been in Rwanda for the past month. Here is an excerpt from his third, and latest, email. (Previous emails can be found here and here):

Because Rwanda, like so much of Sub-Saharan Africa,has historically survived by having strong, powerful (and unelected) leaders, like tribal elders, there is no culture of independent decision making, or even for many independent thought. A volunteer teacher at the Centre told me she was amazed when in one of her art classes she gave the pupils the option to draw anything they wanted. None of them knew what to do and sat there with blank looks and blank paper. They all, and many were in their mid teens, wanted to be told what to draw.

This deferment of responsibility and unwillingness to make independent decisions manifests itself in so many ways. A problem or argument can be solved simply by asking an older person, who by virtue of their age is considered to be wise. But in a society where no one has a schedule, no one keeps an appointment and no one makes a decision, it is amazing that anything ever happens.

And yet somehow things seem to get done and remarkably we have completed most of the filming around the Children’s Centre in Kigali. In the next few days we venture out into the countryside to no doubt experience a whole new and interesting set of complications.

I keep wondering whether Dave’s observations about group think and deference to authority are any excuse for the genocide. Probably not, but an interesting insight nonetheless into how the killing took place.

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I just heard a reporter for the BBC say that passengers whose flights were canceled at Heathrow airport yesterday, slept last night “in an orderly queue.” Only in England.

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The visa/passport situation is not looking good. My credit card has not been charged for the visa processing fee, the courier firm says it has no deliveries scheduled for my postcode today, and the embassy is sticking by its 10 to 15 working day processing time. In 24 hours, Christmas in Denmark with Sofie and her family will be officially ruined.

At this rate, the earliest I can hope to see my passport is December 29. My Copenhagen-New York flight is scheduled for December 30. I am beginning to wonder whether I will even make that.

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I made a few notes of my first impressions of England while I was traveling up to Leeds on Thursday:

In London, the newspaper is king. I see many people reading books on the subway in New York, but on the Tube 90 percent of people read newspapers and 90 percent of the newspapers are Metro. I was very impressed with the breadth and depth of coverage in Metro. If the UK was ruled by One State, One State would control Metro.

Ridiculous as this may seem, London is still very English and very white. Having said that, I have never heard so much Polish or Russian in London before.

Maybe it’s the time of year but most Londoners looked miserable. Come on, people! You live in one of the greatest cities in the world. Be happy!

The Tube is abysmal. Almost every tube train I took was delayed or changed its destination while I was on it. I spent most of my time at tube stations listening to information about delays on other lines. Perhaps this is the reason everyone in London is so depressed. If Transport for London stopped telling people about the delays and just let people wait, a la New York, maybe everyone would cheer up a bit.

Everywhere I went people were coughing and sneezing yet, despite the damp and the cold wind, almost no one was wearing a hat or a warm coat. Why?

The British countryside is gorgeous. Even the London-Leeds train journey, which I always used to consider so bland, beats the pants off almost every journey I have taken in the US; that includes New York-Boston, New York-Washington, Houston-Del Rio and New York-Hamptons. The UK does farmers’ fields, country homes and villages better than anyone else (except perhaps the French).

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Three days to go. I’m getting nervous.

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A valiant effort by the groom-to-be this weekend at Haydock Park.

Although, how he ended up like this I couldn’t possibly say.

Now, to that best man’s speech…

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I am in England. I’ve been here since Sunday. But I haven’t been able to write about it because part of this trip is a secret appearance at my friend James’ stag do.

If you are reading this on Saturday I am probably settling into a vodka tonic at Haydock Park or sampling the nightlife of that jewel of the north, Wigan. If you’re reading this on Sunday, I should be nursing a hangover and hurtling back over the Pennines to my parents in Leeds as fast as possible.

But that’s not the reason for the cryptic silence—that, I am afraid to say, is a sadder story. Because the main reason I took such an early Christmas vacation was to sort out some visa paperwork at the US embassy in London. It was supposed to be a formality. But at the embassy on Monday I was told that my crinkled passport was unacceptable and my application was suspended until I could produce a new one.

Forty eight hours and £108 later I had a new passport. Twelve hours and £53 after that a courier picked up my passport and took it to the US embassy for processing. If the white form that the embassy gave me (along with the request for a further $104 to add to the initial £60 visa processing fee) is correct then it will take a further 10 to 15 business days to process my visa.

I don’t have 10 to 15 business days. I have flights booked. I have Christmas plans. It’s a waiting game now to see how fast I can get my passport (with visa) back. It’s not been the best of weeks. I haven’t seen the sun since I left Copenhagen on Sunday morning en route for England.

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Sorry for the lack of posts this week. All will be made clear very soon.

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